What would Mandela do? A hard leader for hard times: Jonny Steinberg

Key topics:

• Ramaphosa often invokes Mandela, but misrepresents his leadership style

• Mandela was a tough, decisive leader who didn’t hesitate to confront dissent

• In today's crisis, Mandela would act boldly, not resort to weak inquiries

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By Jonny Steinberg*

In 2023 South African author Jonny Steinberg published a book on former South African president Nelson Mandela and his tumultuous marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. To mark the 107th anniversary of Mandela’s birth, Steinberg wrote the following as an introduction to our newsletter of 18 July 2025.

As Nelson Mandela’s birthday approaches, I find that without any conscious bidding my mind has embarked on a thought experiment: If Mandela were in Cyril Ramaphosa’s shoes now, if he were president of South Africa facing a truly shocking crisis in the criminal justice system, what would he do?

It’s a silly experiment, I know, both because he isn’t here, and because people, especially unusual people like Nelson Mandela, tend to surprise you.

But I can’t help it, and it is partly Ramaphosa’s fault. He is forever invoking Mandela’s name, forever claiming to channel his spirit. Mandela, he says ad nauseum, was the world’s great consensus builder; his ship would not sail until all had consented to board.

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This could not be further from the truth. Mandela was a patrician leader, at times even a draconian leader, who steamrolled dissent when he thought it necessary. And he led at a time when it was necessary. During the transition to democracy, he ended the armed struggle in the face of fierce opposition from across the democratic movement. He abandoned nationalisation when the trade union movement and South African Communist Party screamed that he had sold out. He went into these battles fiercely. He was rude, arrogant, insulting. He interrupted people when they were speaking. He was a hard man who played a hard game; he’d been like that all his life.

I would hazard a guess that in the midst of the crisis Ramaphosa is facing, Mandela’s most patrician qualities would have come out. He’d be firing people. He’d be insulting them in public speeches. He would put on that forbidding face of his, his lips in a downturned grimace.

Would it have worked? He managed to drag a volatile movement through a nightmarishly difficult transition to democracy. Could he have dragged it out of the quagmire of criminalisation and violence it finds itself in now? Who knows? What’s left of the African National Congress may be too far gone for that. What he would not do, I am sure, is tepidly announce yet another commission of inquiry.

*Jonny Steinberg Senior lecturer in African Studies, Yale University

This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished with permission